Last week I attended Sitecore Digital Trendspot 2014 and listened to the UK CEO of POSSIBLE, Justin Cooke, speak on how his agency helped transform the annual missive from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and more than doubled its expected reach.

As you are probably aware, Bill Gates has dedicated much of his recent life and indeed billions of dollars to philanthropy.

In 2000 The William H Gates Foundation was renamed The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and as of 2008 Gates has taken a full-time role co-chairing the charitable foundation.

By May 2013 Bill Gates had donated 28bn dollars to the foundation and yet is still currently the richest man on the planet with a personal fortune of $76bn.

The foundation’s aim is to tackle the world’s ‘toughest problems’. Extreme poverty and poor health in developing countries, and the failures of America’s education system.

One of the key methods of communication that the foundation uses is an annual letter, written by Bill Gates himself, in which he shares in a frank way the foundation’s goal, where progress is being made and where it is not.

In 1998, the United States Department of Justice and 20 states filed a lawsuit against Microsoft alleging that the software giant abused a monopoly position in the market to dominate the market for web browsers.

The stakes were high. If it lost, Microsoft could have been forced to break itself into two parts. And even though it eventually settled under more favorable terms, the case against Microsoft is arguably the defining moment in the company's history.